The following description of background art may include insights, discoveries, understandings or disclosures, or associations together with disclosures not known to the relevant art prior to the present disclosure but provided by the disclosure. Some of such contributions may be specifically pointed out below, whereas other such contributions will be apparent from their context.
In modern communication and computer networks, data exchange between programs and computers is a vital element. Different programs, computers and processors exchange data without human intervention. This kind of communication is usually called machine-to-machine (M2M) communications.
An example of a network technology where M2M communication is widely applied is a low-power wireless network, such as an IEEE 802.15.4 based embedded and sensor network.
Applications running in devices connected to the Internet may need information provided by M2M devices. Traditional addressing method of using and processing Universal Resource Identifiers has certain problems when used in M2M networks comprising many end-points. Existing Internet protocols using universal resource identifier (URI) schemes resolve just the FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name) part of a Universal Resource Locator URL into an Internet Protocol (IP) address. For example, if the URL is coap://node.example.com/path, the resolved part would be node.example.com. The Domain Name System DNS resolves the URL into a point-to-point address. A single DNS mapping can be made to return multiple IP addresses but this feature is used to load balancing purposes where the multiple addresses point to the same service.